Levkas Man (10 page)

‘It's something political, I think.' Florrie was staring thoughtfully at her empty glass. ‘Kapetán Kondylakes referred at one point to security arrangements. But don't worry,' she added. ‘In Greece everything is twisted into a political issue. You have to have patience.'

We drank another bottle, the retsina ice-cold and pungent, the sunlight warm. Later we had lunch in the taverna opposite, picking out the things we wanted from the bubbling pots on the kitchen range—a fish soup and shish-kebab with stuffed tomatoes. The bare concrete room echoed to the rapid sound of Greek. We didn't talk much ourselves. And then, just as we were finishing, the Port Captain and Kondylakes came in, accompanied by a civilian in a light grey suit. He was taller than the other two. ‘Which is Van der Voort?' he asked as he reached our table.

I got to my feet and he said, ‘Kotiadis my name. Demetrios Kotiadis.'

We shook hands and he sat down, motioning the other two to pull up chairs. He had a long, rather sallow face, with a big beak of a nose and heavy-lidded eyes. He was smoking a Greek cigarette and this stayed firmly in his mouth. ‘Do you speak French?'

I shook my head.

‘Then excuse my English please.' He clapped his hands for the waiter and ordered coffee for all of us. ‘You are arriving here in Greece to see Dr Van der Voort.'

I nodded, wondering what was coming.

‘We also wish to see him. So we co-operate, eh?' He smiled at me thinly.

I didn't say anything. I wanted a cigarette, but my hands were trembling again.

‘You know he has disappeared?'

‘Yes.'

‘He has been missing for two weeks now. Do you know why?'

I shook my head.

‘And you don't know where he is?'

‘No.'

‘Then why you come? Have you some message for him, some instructions?'

‘How do you mean?' And because I didn't understand what he was driving at I started to explain again why I had come to Greece. The coffee arrived, poured out of individual copper pots, and he sat staring at me through the smoke of his cigarette. ‘Do you know this man Cartwright who is with him?'

‘No.'

‘Or the Dutch boy, Winters?'

I shook my head.

‘But you know there has been some trouble?'

‘I know that—yes.'

He hesitated. ‘There was a question of some money taken. But that has been settled now; it is a young Greek boy who breaks open the tool locker of the Land-Rover. So it is not for that reason he disappear.' He stared at me, waiting. Finally he gave a little shrug. ‘If you wish I can take you to this village where they camp.'

I muttered something about not wishing to trouble him, but he brushed it aside. ‘No trouble. I like to help you. Also we can talk—privately, eh?' And he added, to make it absolutely clear that I had no alternative, ‘It is fortunate for you that I am at Methoni today, otherwise Kondylakes here must take you to Athens for interrogation. If we leave after our coffee we can be at Despotiko tomorrow morning and then you can talk with this man Cartwright. Maybe you discover what I have failed to discover—where Dr Van der Voort is.' He smiled at me and left it at that.

I lit a cigarette and sat there watching him, thinking of the journey ahead and the two of us alone. He was a man in his late forties, or early fifties, well educated and with a strong energetic personality. It was difficult to place him. When I asked him about his official position, all he replied was that he was with a Ministry in Athens and was here to help Kapetán Kondylakes in his enquiries. He could have been security police, of course. But there was a peculiar mixture of toughness and charm in his manner; also a certain air of secrecy. I thought he was probably Intelligence.

The coffee was strong and sweet and very hot, and as we sat there drinking it, the three Greeks talking amongst themselves, I felt a strong sense of isolation. Florrie touched my hand. ‘It will be all right, Paul. I'm sure it will.' And she added, ‘We can meet you in Preveza.' Bert agreed. ‘We can be there in two, possibly three days—dependent on the weather. We'll wait for you there.'

When we had finished our coffee, Kondylakes returned our passports and the Port Captain handed Bert the ship's papers. They were free to sail when they wished. Back at the boat, I threw some clothes into my suitcase and by the time I was ready to leave, Kotiadis was waiting for me on the quay, his battered Renault backed up to the gangplank.

It was shortly after two when we drove out of Pylos, following the coast road that took a wide sweep round Navarino Bay, and then up into the hills, with Kotiadis talking all the time about his country's ancient history. He was a compulsive, explosive talker, his English interspersed with French and Greek words, and his enthusiasm for Greek antiquities was genuine. All the way up through the Peloponnese he was talking and driving fast, using his horn on the bends.

We crossed to the mainland of Greece by the ferry that plies the narrows separating the two gulfs of Patras and Corinth. By then the sun had set and we stopped the night at the ancient port of Navpaktos. It was here, after our meal, that I faced the questions I had been expecting. We were sitting under the plane trees in the square and Kotiadis was talking about his early life on the island of Crete where he had been born.

His family had owned a small vineyard, growing grapes for the raisin trade, but when the Germans invaded in 1941, he had left to join the guerrillas in the mountains. The air in the square was soft, and below us lay the medieval harbour, a circle of still, dark water surrounded by massive stone walls that had been built at the same time as the castle piled on the hill above us. Beyond the black curve of the harbour wall, the Gulf of Corinth lay serene and pale under the moon. The serenity of the scene was almost unreal in contrast to the story of hatred, violence and sudden death revealed by Kotiadis in staccato English.

The tide of liberation had swept him across to Athens and the picture he drew of a young man flung into a political maelstrom made my own background seem humdrum by comparison. In Athens he had been involved in yet more killing, this time his own people. ‘The Communist organization ELAS,' he said. ‘I hate Communists.' We had been drinking coffee and ouzo and the tone of his voice was suddenly quite violent. ‘You are lucky. You do not experience civil war. To kill Germans because they invade your country—that is good, that is natural. But war between men of the same race, that is terrible.' He sighed and tossed back the remains of his ouzo. ‘We are a very political peoples—very excitable. It is the climate, the chaleur. In summer we play with our beads, we try to soothe our nerves, and then we explode like the storm cloud. That is why politics are so dangerous in Greece.' He leaned towards me. ‘Have you seen a father kill his own son, deliberately and in cold blood?' He nodded, his eyes staring, bloodshot with cigarette smoke. ‘I have. The boy was a Communist. And when it was done the father threw himself down on the boy's body, kissing his cheek and weeping. That is la guerre civile. I don't like. That is why you are here with me now. For us a man like Dr Van der Voort can be dangerous. He is a Communist and if we do not find him—'

‘That's not true,' I protested. ‘He hasn't been a Communist—'

‘Ah, so you admit he was a Communist?'

‘Yes. As a student. But not after 1940.'

‘Óhi, óhi.' He made a negative movement with his fingers. ‘Après la guerre—long after, he is travelling in Russia, accepting money from the Soviet government, writing books for publication in Moscow and information for their scientific journals. Why does he do that if he is not a Communist?'

‘That was years ago,' I said. ‘Since about 1959 he's been working entirely on his own.'

‘How do you know? You tell Kondylakes you do not see him for eight years.'

I repeated what Gilmore had said, but it made no difference. ‘Once a man is a Communist, he does not change because of a little brutality in Hungary. Communism is the creed of the proletariat, and the proletariat represents man at his most brutal.'

‘He wouldn't have seen it that way,' I said. ‘For him Hungary would have come as a terrible shock. Anyway,' I added, ‘I'm certain he isn't a Communist now.'

‘That is not my information.' He summoned the boy from the kaféneion across the road and ordered more ouzo, ‘Not only have the Russians financed his expeditions in the Soviet Union, but also in Turkey. You know we have been invaded by Turkey since six centuries. We do not like the Turks, and he was in Cyprus when the troubles begin.' And after that he sat, silent and morose, until the boy came running with a tray loaded with bottles and glasses. He drank half a tumbler of water and then said, ‘Now, tell me about yourself. Particularly about your relations with Dr Van der Voort. I wish to understand please.'

The interrogation seemed to last endlessly, with him probing and probing as though I were trying to conceal from him some obvious truth. But in the end he gave it up, or else he just became bored. It was already past eleven, and shortly afterwards we left the square and walked back to the hotel. It had been an exhausting two hours, and even when I was in bed, his belligerent, staccato English continued drumming in my head.

Next morning I was called at six-thirty and we left early, driving back the way we had come to rejoin the main road, which ran west to the swamps of Missolonghi. ‘Do you read your poet Byron in England now?' Kotiadis asked.

‘No,' I said.

‘Not at school?' He shook his head at me sadly. ‘Here in Missolonghi he has his headquarters for the struggle to liberate Greece from the Turks. Here he dies. He never saw the liberation. But in Greece we remember Byron. Why do you not remember him?'

I had no answer to that, and Missolonghi looked a miserable place. The road swung north to Agrinion and then down to the shores of the great inland sea that I remembered from the chart—the Gulf of Amvrakikos. And all the time, slices of history mingled with questions, and the sun getting hotter. As we swung away from the gulf we came to a road junction signposted Preveza to the left, Arta and Jannina to the right. We turned right, climbing again, and there were peasants on the road and in the fields.

‘Beyond Jannina we shall be very near the frontier with Albánia.' He said it with strong emphasis on the second ‘a' as though he hated the place. ‘Albánia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria—all the north of our country is a border with Communist territory and it is from these Communist territories Dr Van der Voort comes with his expedition. You know the Red Army is holding manœuvres in Bulgaria, all the Warsaw Pact forces? And their fleet is in our waters, in the Aegean.' He was staring at me, his cigarette dangling from his lips. ‘Don't you think it strange that he should come into our country from Macedonia at this exact moment?'

‘I doubt whether he gave it a thought.'

‘You think he does not know there is trouble coming again between the Arabs and the Jews?'

‘Another Israeli-Egyptian war?'

‘You do not read the papers—listen to the radio?'

‘I don't speak Greek,' I reminded him.

‘But Dr Van der Voort does.'

‘He wouldn't be interested.'

‘No?'

‘A mind like his,' I said, ‘dedicated to the work that has been his whole life—'

‘Phui! He is trained by the Russians and he has been in Greece before.'

We were still climbing, the road snaking through bare hills with a great deal of rock. With every mile we were driving deeper and deeper into the heart of Greece, and further away from Preveza and the sea.

‘When is he in Greece before, do you know?'

‘I've no idea.'

He nodded. ‘Of course, you do not see him for eight years. So how can you know he was here last year. He arrived on 4th April, in Kérkira—what you call Corfu.' He sounded his horn and thrust past a truck loaded with reeds, a blind bend just ahead. ‘Last year he is alone, and for three months he is wandering by himself in the Ionian islands, particularly Levkas, and he is on Meganisi, where he lives for some days at the village of Vatahori. He has a tent with him and a rucksack, and then for almost two weeks there is no trace of him. Next I find him at limáni Levkas—the port, you understand—and afterwards he walks from Preveza towards Jannina, along the way we are driving now, talking to people, climbing to the tops of the hills, wandering down dry river beds as though he is looking for gold, and all the time he is making notes and drawing little plans. Why, if he is not an agent?'

‘He's a palæontologist,' I said wearily. ‘He was looking for bones.'

‘Bones?' He stared at me, his eyebrows lifted, and I found myself in the difficult position of trying to explain my father's work. If I had said old Greek coins, or bronze statuettes, he would probably have understood, but searching for bones and worked flints, for traces of early man, was beyond his comprehension. ‘The only proper study in my country is the great civilization of Ancient Greece. Nothing else is important.' And he went on to say that he had traced Dr Van der Voort to a village called Ayios Giorgios. ‘There we lose track of him again, nothing for a whole month.'

‘You seem to have followed his movements very closely.'

‘Of course. That is why I am at Methoni when you arrive. At Methoni he take a caique north along the coast. But it all happened a year ago, so it is difficult to follow him with exact dates. About the middle of August he take the caique—to Levkas again.' He muttered something to himself in Greek. ‘Why does he go back to Levkas? And he is on that island more than a month. Why?' he demanded excitedly.

‘I don't know.'

‘Levkas, Kérkira, Cephalonia, all those Ionian islands—seven of them—are under a British Protectorate for fifty years. Turkey and France held them for a short time. For centuries before they are Venetian. Is that why he goes back to Levkas—because they are more vulnerable politically?'